4.6 Specifying what to tag by date or revision

The cvs rtag command tags the repository as of a
certain date or time (or can be used to tag the latest
revision). rtag works directly on the
repository contents (it requires no prior checkout and
does not look for a working directory).

The following options specify which date or revision to
tag. See section A.5 Common command options, for a complete
description of them.

-D date

Tag the most recent revision no later than date.

-f

Only useful with the ‘-D date’ or ‘-r tag’
flags. If no matching revision is found, use the most
recent revision (instead of ignoring the file).

-r tag

Only tag those files that contain existing tag tag.

The cvs tag command also allows one to specify
files by revision or date, using the same ‘-r’,
‘-D’, and ‘-f’ options. However, this
feature is probably not what you want. The reason is
that cvs tag chooses which files to tag based on
the files that exist in the working directory, rather
than the files which existed as of the given tag/date.
Therefore, you are generally better off using cvs
rtag. The exceptions might be cases like: